the silk roads

Extremely well-written and exhaustively reported history of the region running from modern Turkey and Egypt to western China, and from the Central Asian steppe to the Persian Gulf. The first half of the book is told at a breathtaking pace: Richard I merits barely two sentences in a chapter about the early Crusades. And it is told really from the perspective of the people who lived and traveled around the "Silk Roads" region. The Vikings are relevant only because they were big traders of slaves from Europe into Persian and Arab markets. Even Rome is an afterthought. Much more important

Frankopan slows down as he gets into the rise of Europe over the last 500 years, and gets progressively slower as the tale gets more recent. The last 200-odd pages are dedicated to the period from World War I to the present. And oddly, for a book that sets out to be a corrective to Eurocentric narratives that look "at the past from the perspective of the winners of recent history," the perspective of the second half of the book is decidedly Eurocentric. Sure, various European countries took turns becoming the dominant power during that stretch. But it's disappointing that we're not told that story from the perspective of, say, the Levantine traders who partnered with Venice and Genoa, or the Persian bureaucrats who signed away the country's oil wealth to Britain and the Persian businessmen.

Partly that must be because records from recent centuries are so much richer than those from longer ago. And partly it may be because the organizing principle of history in Frankopan's telling is the trade of luxury goods (and, recently, bulk commodities like wheat and oil). As Europe became the world's main consumer and eventually trader of those goods, maybe it's inevitable that Frankopan would start to speak with their voice. Still, it's a bit of a let-down. I bet the Persians kept keeping records.

The last couple of chapters rehashed events I'm already pretty familiar with: US and British fuckery in this part of the world, the Cold War, and then 9/11 and its fallout. Still, there were some nuggets in there that I didn't know or had forgotten, such as Dick Cheney's personal role in selling nuclear technology to Iran in the 1970s. And Frankopan is a lively enough writer that I didn't mind racing through that bit.

On the whole, it's an impressive historical survey of a crucial part of the world. Easy four stars.

patricia lockwood

I came across this piece by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, "The Communal Mind," and it is blowing my little mind. I've not finished it yet because it's long and I'm at work, but holy crap. I was vaguely aware of her poetry and online presence -- the title of her collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is hard to forget -- but now I'm dying to read more of it. This prose poetry, whatever it is, in the LRB piece, is about the experience of living a life that's connected inextricably to the internet. I think a lot about my own compulsive clicking and scrolling, worry about it in a vague way, occasionally make efforts to reduce screen time. I am, luckily, not a terribly compulsive person, so I don't think I have it as bad as some. But no one has ever crystallized the experience of living online like this, at least not that I've read.

A sample:

The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.

Why were her lungs so shallow after three or four hours of it, and her pulse like a rabbit’s, its whole body full of the thought what’s there, what’s next, what is that wind? And blood, do I smell blood?

Was there even a gloaming any more, or had the computers eaten it?
And had there always been this many mystery blobs washing up on seashores, or was it new?

A picture of a species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, ‘It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.’

me
me
unbelievably me
it me